January 30, 2023
Sheriff Akshar today issued a press release celebrating a return to full visitation hours. If only this were true.
Here is the real situation:
In 2019 the jail offered 45 hours of visitation hours every week as documented in the jail’s own handbook.
Sheriff Harder eliminated visitation completely in 2020 and refused to reopen visitation even as nursing homes, jails and prisons reopened their doors to family visits. In response to our lawsuit, he was forced to reopen visitation—but then dictated but 15 hours (and far fewer for women for example in select jail units).
Sheriff Akshar now proposes that families of the incarcerated have 30 hours a week to visit their loved ones.
This is unacceptable: there are still 50 % fewer hours than available before COVID. The county needs at the very least to return to pre-covid jail visitation hours with a full five days and 45 hours as posted in the jail handbook in 2019/2020.
The county also needs to remove new limits on visitation that the Sheriff does not mention but family members and people awaiting trial know all too well. These include new rules that cut 50 % of visitation hours as a punishment for alleged disciplinary infractions, and the imposition of new hour-long visitation blocks (versus earlier 30 minute blocks) which limits the numbers and hours family may visit. There are no weekend hours as well.
Visitation under current conditions makes families rely on expensive video and telephone calls that generate super-profits for the Sheriff and his corporate contractor. We endorse what families of the incarcerated repeatedly demand: that they be paid back the excess $millions they have spent due to these restrictions.
Why do these problems continue, year after year?
The Sheriff continues to maintain control over the mechanisms of mass incarceration, independent of community control. Operating with an ever-growing county budget and over 200 employees, there is no effective oversight of the Sheriff, jail conditions, or financial operations. Unilaterally reducing visitation further removes and isolates the jail from public observation. It allows the county to continue past patterns, despite legal rulings and lost lawsuits, in covering up wrongful death and abuse, while ignoring even the minimal state regulations on the operation of jails, in sum, denying basic human rights.